“Pages eighty-seven to eighty-nine. Odd problems only,” he recites.
“Thanks.”
“Okay,” he says. “Well, you can study now.”
Then he pulls his shirt up over his head. I look at my feet. “What are you doing?”
“Turning my shirt inside out. Just in case I run into your dad on my way downstairs.”
“Why do you have that shirt anyway?”
He shrugs. “Jayson and I saw it in Berkeley at one of those T-shirt stores and I thought it was funny. I guess it’s kind of lame.”
I don’t want to think about Ingrid’s journal entry again, so instead I think about what I would do if Taylor started to kiss me. I imagine him reaching out for me. I would forget about everything bad for a little while.
My face gets hot. The real Taylor is right here, standing in front of me, apparently at a loss for words. Now his shirt says Xes ROF KROW LLIW.
“Thanks for giving me the assignment. I mean, it was kind of weird for you to just show up here. But, thanks.”
“No worries,” he says. He turns and walks to my door and stops.
Then he says, “That thing you told me about Ingrid? I guess that was your way of telling me that it was jacked up of me to ask how she did it. So I guess I also came to tell you that I’m sorry if it seemed like that to you. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He stops and I can see that he’s thinking about something. Finally, he says, “It was harsh, though, the way you told me. I learned the stages of grief once. I think you might be in the anger stage.”
He says it from across the room, but it feels like he just reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed me there. I feel my eyes well up. I can’t think of anything to say to him, so I just look at the carpet and he says, “See you,” and then I’m alone in my room again.
I retrieve Ingrid’s journal, ready to break my one-entry-a-day rule. But then I put it down. I need something that will listen and talk back. I rifle through my drawer for the school directory and open it to Schuster. There’s Dylan’s number next to a pixelated photo of her glowering for the camera.
I recognize her voice when she answers. It isn’t low but it’s kind of raspy.
“Hi,” I say. “This is Caitlin.”
“Oh, hey,” she says, and I’m so thankful at the way she says it, like it’s totally normal for me to call her.
“So, um. I have to do this photo assignment tomorrow after school? And I was wondering if you might want to come with me. We could go to the noodle place or somewhere before.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Dylan says. I hear her mumble something in the background. “So I’ll meet you at our lockers?”
“Okay, cool,” I say, and I’m glad she isn’t here to see me nodding my head up and down over and over like an idiot.
I hang up and go outside again, but this time I climb into my car. I turn the tape on and listen until I fall asleep.
28
I thought it would be easy to find a bad landscape, but it isn’t. Even things that are ugly and plain in real life look different once I’m looking through the camera. Everything small turns significant. The gaps between branches on a sad little shrub transform into a striking example of negative space. I pivot around to face the strip mall. I half expect some miracle, but it remains ugly through the lens. I’m about to snap a picture when Dylan stops me.
“Wait,” she says. “Your teacher’s going to think that you’re making a statement. She’s going to be like, ‘Caitlin, fabulous commentary on our consumerist culture,’ or something.”
I lower the camera. “You’re right. We need to find a place that’s all just dirt.”
Dylan sips her coffee, says, “There’s this place that’s like a block from my house where the land’s all leveled.”
We start walking.
Dylan lives in the opposite direction from me, on the newer side of town. The houses there are mostly huge. Some of them are trying to look Spanish with white stucco exteriors and clay tile roofs. Others are just gigantic, modern boxes.
We get there and stop. “This is exactly what I wanted,” I say, staring at a dirt lot.
“I think someone’s going to build a house here.”
I start messing with the aperture on my camera.
“What are you doing?”
“I want it to be overexposed and out of focus.”
Dylan laughs. “So why, exactly, do you want your picture to suck so badly?”
“The photo teacher hates me and I hate her.”
“Sounds healthy.”
Dylan watches me take a couple of pictures of the dirt. The light outside is just the way I want it—not too bright. The contrast of the dirt against the sky will be almost nonexistent. After I’ve snapped a couple shots, Dylan shakes her head.
“Why does she hate you?”
I try to think of a way to explain it that won’t make her freak out the way my parents did. I stop messing with the camera and sit down on the curb next to her.
“It’s hard to explain. I was in her class last year, with Ingrid. She was actually nice then. But Ingrid’s like this amazing photographer.” I stop. “Or she was, I mean. An amazing photographer. So Ms. Delani was really nice to me because I was always with Ingrid.”
“And she isn’t nice anymore?”
“She just completely ignores me.”
Dylan nods. She watches me closely. “Okay,” she finally says. “So you’re doing this to get her attention.”